Sunrise at Grailville

Turning Around

Morning Mist at Grailville

On my first retreat, I just hoped, fervently, to get through it, to endure.  On my second retreat I tasted the joy of dropping my busy life and abiding in emptiness, and I began to hope to attain enlightenment, which I conceived of as always abiding in emptiness.  This fall, many retreats later, I was back to hoping to get through it without getting exhausted and sick. Before the retreat began I told Ama Samy that I might not be able to make all the sits.  He understood - I had been sick the last time I came to retreat, in 2007, so sick that I felt discouraged about coming back.

I had an aspiration coming in - that I would accept whatever happens with my coming kidney transplant. The response was somewhat different than I thought it would be.  I find I am now at ease with the transplant.  My mind has been stripped of the parade of fears and symbolizing, both forms of delusion.  Now I see that transplant is a medical treatment; the OSU team does about 200 kidney transplants a year.  Every transplant center's numbers are posted online - short- and long-term survival of both "the graft" and the donor - and their numbers are good.  There is so much oversight of transplants that you might stand a better chance with this kind of surgery than any other.

How did this change happen?  I was not aware of any blinding insight as I sat day after day, and I didn't notice this new me until I was talking with a friend about it yesterday.  If I named one crucial moment, it must be the healing blessing given to me on Sunday, after the Eucharist (Ama Samy is also a Jesuit priest), when people can ask for prayers for those in need.  Ama Samy surprised me into tears by calling me forward and asking everyone to lay hands on me, and pray for my good health, and he did himself. 

The energy of this long moment of love from so many hands filled the center of my body, my heart, I guess it is, and for the next day or two I was deeply relaxed and tired - or perhaps I knew how very tired I was, and stopped trying.  I rested, joining only some of the sits, hardly able to walk to the dining hall, too tired to get up and walk kinhin or go to dokusan (individual brief meetings with the Teacher). 

Then I was fine, feeling better than I had for years.  I made it to almost every sit, going to dokusan even when I had nothing much to say except to express gratitude.

A confusion of thoughts

No, a confusion of feelings. Thought-feelings.  Important events.  Yesterday I decided to go on retreat with Tom.  This led quickly to the lists of things to be sure to pack, (don't forget the emergency meds) and things to do before we go (get money).  They traveled around in my mind at night while I lay restlessly half-sleeping.  I am doing this in part because I'm just too anxious already, and because it is a chance to receive three meals a day.  (But pack your Butterfinger bar.)

Too soon I will have that chance again, though - three meals a day in the hospital.  They are about to schedule our transplant.  It looks like Oct. 12, which coincides with our wedding anniversary.  It might be sooner, except that I'll be gone on retreat and can't do the final cross-match that is required exactly 7 days before the surgery.

How exciting is this?  I talked to an artist-friend after church on Sunday.  We decided that there may be no difference between scared and excited.  I thought of going on a roller coaster, which I have done several times in my youth, really scared.  It was so much fun.  You abandon yourself to the stream.

Right now I am skipping from one planfull thought to another, many stones going across the water.  I hope that on the retreat these thoughts will get tired of themselves - at least the thoughts about remembering my worldly necessities (don't forget the Phoslo!), those will be gone, I think.

I don't like the fact of having to have some human contact during the week.  My experience is that I go deeper and quieter if I don't.  But on the weekend the sits will be held in the Oratory, about a quarter-mile away, and it's back and forth several times a day.  I used to love walking that gravel road.  But right now that's a lot of exercise for me.  I'll get enough walking going to and from the dining hall.  But while we're in the Oratory, I will mostly have to ride with Tom. And every second night he has to wrap my arm in the tight compression bandages.  Another medical necessity.  We don't have to talk, however, and Tom is not a chatterer.

Along those lines, this whole thing is a great challenge to me to take care of myself, to rest when I need to, not to rush at all.  Well, I don't "strain after enlightenment" anymore, what teacher used that word?  That's the key - wanting nothing, just being where you are, who you are. Watching the cows in the adjoining field walk slowly home in the twilight.

We will have a full moon our last night there.  Very auspicious. I think about picking a bouquet of wildflowers - there are many more than you think in September, once you look for them. Maybe I will feel I can walk out to the pond.  Here's a haiku I wrote one year, standing there.

blue dragonfly, come back!
this time I will not brush you off.

Urgently Meditating

[yes, that lower picture is a web built by a spider on caffeine)

It is something a Zen retreat tries to tell us with The Evening Gatha - You could die any minute. You don’t have forever to get with your life. You can’t be waiting for It to happen. Teachers say it in their dharma talks. You begin to get it.

I got it big in the early seventies. I have written before about how a book helped me think closely about what really mattered to me. I came up with the understanding that I urgently needed "to learn to relax." Well, that's a long story of not understanding what it would take, how I needed to change my life down to the very foundations. I'd rather do a bit of memoir on the arrythmia I experienced last month. It was called "a heart event."

Don't you like the term, an "event"? It was not a heart attack, nor was my heart damaged. I didn't have a blockage - I went out of rhythm. I find that evocative, because I did have the feeling in the weeks before that that I was too speeded up. It was a fact that my heart rate was higher than usual. It was a sort of too-much-caffeine feeling, though I never drank coffee after noon. (In the hospital I got off caffeine against my will, but have stayed off.)

The event . . . my heart began thumping, like an engine that's missing, and then felt like it was bounding around in all directions, racing faster, so that I got shorter of breath. When it peaked I realized I could be dying right now right here on this couch with no warning I could die!

This was the second time in my adult life that I knew that - nothing about dying from fear or grief, it was the genuine thing, the body. (The first time was the cancer diagnosis in 1997, which caused me to begin meditating.) Facing death is much harder if you think it is the very end of you, that there is nothing beyond. And since our beloved cat Sherlock died four months ago, I have been convinced that the death of the body is the end, for in no way has he come back to give me a sign. Our bond with that animal was so deep that I believe if such a thing were possible, he would have done it.

Dying, I felt, was just going to be descending into blackness. Gone. I haven't even recorded myself singing Keep Me in Your Heart for a While (but here is a lovely version).

Well, there is so much time in the heart hospital, time when you are awakened at 3:00 a.m. by someone taking your vitals or drawing your blood, and can't get back to sleep. No laptop, nothing much to do but think. Sense how worn out you are from that "event," how it battered your heart. Think about how you had been sliding on your meditation practice. Skipping days, doing it lightly, just ten minutes maybe, or just sitting outside in a lawn chair letting the universe be with me, contemplating. But not meditating.

Meditation is hard work. Seung Sahn said Americans won't do it because it is boring, and he laughed. Maybe the truth is right there - that America is a culture of Getting Somewhere, Getting Some Thing, you know, fame, money, status, going for it, just doing it, accomplishing. It is our heredity, and it surrounds us everywhere. This is why there needs to be an American form of Zen that truly takes this psychology into account. In my opinion, such an approach to Buddhism will keep before us the issues of our yang. How, for instance, being aggressive increases testoserone, which makes an individual tend toward aggression.

I got it during that event - I could die. If it hadn't calmed down, I would have. In my three days in the lovely private room in the privileged heart hospital I began meditating again. Out of bed, sit in a chair, do the posture as well as you can.

Home I didn't have to take a vow - I just started my morning practice again, sitting upright now with the incense I get from Zen Mountain Monastery, and a tea candle in a rose quartz holder. Started inching my time up from 20 minutes in case I decide to go to the Ama Samy retreat later this month, where the sits are 25 minutes. A retreat costs a lot, takes me away from my doctors and all my comforts and protections, most of all, asks a great deal of me. Follow the schedule. Meditate all day. No distracting. Some people call it "facing the wall." I think about that, how it is a metaphor. What is the wall you face? Is death a wall?

A retreat always stimulates my practice. What else would make me stay with it? besides this motivation, this urgent feeling that I could die, which is coupled with the conviction that meditation does destress me, and gives me a space to touch down on my true self, to be myself before I die. That's a good question, so I'll end with it.